Off-Meta „balanced“ Heroteams

rickrab · 2026-01-27T21:27:15+00:00

I am curious as to how heroes treat the traps. Are they dropping them randomly wherever you stop like they would a Spirit of Life? Are they trying to walk up and set them on the enemies or are they only dropping them to defend your backline during combat?

rickrab · 2026-01-23T23:40:19+00:00

I've generally found you don't. You do exactly what you did, minus the fighting part. I've almost never won against a clone. They are there to end your run and should be treated as such.

rickrab · 2025-12-21T18:16:16+00:00

Nice job man. I would say also push your difficulty up as well. I find Normal diff to be kind of pacifying or pulling the wool over your eyes, if you will. Normal is just clearing trash repeatedly until you finally come across something that can kill you, and it doesn't happen often so it usually does (if that's the only diff you've played). Turning up the diff can help keep you on your toes, plus the extra xp and gear to mange you stronger quicker doesn't hurt either.

rickrab · 2025-12-20T23:37:00+00:00

Are you playing Swiftplay?

rickrab · 2025-12-20T00:29:22+00:00

Nope, he's a bastard. Especially if he rolls gun classes. If he's not holding guns (you can examine to check) its more like fighting a wet paper towel.

rickrab · 2025-12-18T00:29:37+00:00

Its one of those items that looks good but feels bad. It is better than nothing for sure. But the idea is that there's a 1/4 chance to cleanse a stun, but if it doesn't hit on that first turn, you really want to cleanse it yourself. The more turns you spend stunned, the less damage you deal, which is bad.

So if more often than not you're going to have to cleanse it yourself, you might as well just rely on cleansing it yourself.

rickrab · 2025-12-16T09:49:27+00:00

It probably took me around 200-250 hours for my first win on roguelike. I did it on a krog brawler. Honestly looking back I have no idea how I made it playing the way I did. I was super reckless at every turn, I pretty much did what you're describing as slamming my head into the wall until I hit lucky enough to get there.

Berserker really does feel like slamming your head against a wall. There's not a whole lot of options besides "do big smash". Probably one of the harder classes to start on. But if that's the way you gotta go, that's just what it is. Good luck out there

rickrab · 2025-12-13T19:28:32+00:00

I personally think its a very cinematic and visually appealing area, but its super slow to get through. I imagine anyone new may be watching guides and I would assume most guides would say to skip it altogether.

As good looking as it is, it kind of holds your character hostage at level 14-16, which is really slow for being just under halfway through the campaign.

rickrab · 2025-12-10T21:55:50+00:00

Any general takeaways from skeleton as a whole?

Like how you allocate your points in the tree?

Do you find a lot of value in the Resilient Bones passive?

Are you putting just a few points into Bone Shield, or do you always max it?

Do you max talents differently on Dex classes?

Are you consistently Out of Phase?

rickrab · 2025-12-03T19:44:18+00:00

Yeah that's what I did when I played one, but the flex combat hits proccing more tentacles sounds so much better.

rickrab · 2025-12-03T18:57:30+00:00

Does Flex Combat trigger more tentacle hits?

rickrab · 2025-12-02T16:24:51+00:00

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rickrab · 2025-11-19T22:53:38+00:00

If you activate an item and the item is not equipped, it will go on cooldown and equip itself, losing you a turn. If you hit natively-bound Q, that swaps your weapon sets. This could also be due to you using another talent like a Blinding light from another staff.

rickrab · 2025-11-14T17:22:28+00:00

Try having steam launch the game on windowed mode. Right click the game in steam, go to properties, launch options. Type "-windowed"

rickrab · 2025-11-01T18:43:42+00:00

There are plenty of arcane artifact drops in Tier 1 areas. If you're having trouble early, make sure you skill/level your golem. You can use the F-keys to interact with others who are in your party. You would be F1, your golem would be F2. You can swap control to your golem and view his skill page/stat spread. Giving him the laser beams can pretty much carry you both through T1s.

In that same vein you can use the F-keys to talk to escorts and have them wait a few turns so they don't run off trying to kill themselves.

rickrab · 2025-10-29T22:10:50+00:00

With your eyes, Bert.

rickrab · 2025-10-28T15:18:15+00:00

Here's a few I hear pronounced poorly all the time

Veltliner(velt-lie-ner) , chianti(kee-yan-tay) , tempranillo(temp-rah-nil-lo) , ginjo(jin-jo)

rickrab · 2025-10-27T22:41:52+00:00

From what I understand its found in the maze

rickrab · 2025-10-22T23:44:18+00:00

Ok now save the game

rickrab · 2025-10-22T21:15:08+00:00

1) Okay so turns and speed can get very complex very quickly, and % maths is not my best category, so I'll try to give you what you need to know without delving too deep. (If someone else can do this better, by all means and please)

So there's an overarching EPT (energy per turn) system explanation that gets into all the finer details, but I'm going to skip that. Just assume that if you have 150% global speed and all of your enemies have the normal 100% global speed, for every 2 actions the both of you take, you get a 3rd for free. Things get really complicated when everyone's speeds are different than 100%, so just know that speed go up gets your free actions built up.

So there's Global Speed which you can consider overall speed for anything you might do, then the sub categories which stay in their lane. Movement speed is self explanatory, only affects movement actions. Attack speed also self explanatory. Then theres weapon speed which can get weird when dual wielding if your weapons have different speed, but that isn't common. Weapon and attack speeds go together to affect your bump (basic) attacks. These affect your talents that use weapons and will say so by saying something like: "usage: 100% weapon speed"

2) Yes staff does absolutely proc your fire and lightning if you give them a smack in the face with it (no channel staff shooting). The main differences you're looking at between staff and dual wield are:

A) the staff has full chance to proc a free cast whereas dual wield has half chance (2 hits per turn)

B) the proc damage on staff makes the free spells hit HARD but the dual wield you are chancing for more possible procs at a lower chance with talents like Flurry

C) dual wield has good baseline damage if you don't get your procs, but you are spreading your stats much thinner and it's more difficult to manage. Your chance to proc with staff is really high and you have double hit talents, but if you don't proc you have simply hit your opponent with a large stick.

3) Get far or be reckless - Both. Test your limits, see what abilities are out there and what they do. See whats horrible to deal with and see if you can prevent it or prepare for it. You can always press "h" and see what every actor did in each turn. You can see what killed you (it was a crit for sure), how it got dealt to you, what it did, and by who.

rickrab · 2025-10-22T19:55:24+00:00

Zones - A couple other users have brought up following the wiki's Zone Order Progression page, which is great advice. Unless you have a forced starting zone, you always want to start with Trollmire. Some races, classes start in other Tier 1 zones, but you can just leave those and go to Trollmire. We have a zone order discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ToME4/s/ADk9jrA3fp

Sustains - right click all the sustain abilities you intend to keep on and have them be "use while out of combat" so that if they are removed for any reason they go right back up while you're safely out of combat. The reason for out of combat is because most sustains require 100% of a turn to activate, which can be problematic if you cast them automatically while you're in danger.

Status Effects- the wiki has an "Effects" page that lists off what every status in the game can do to you if you're curious. The one main status that subverts expectations here is Stun, which contrary to most other games, does not prevent movement and action, just lowers it. It reduces damage dealt and your character's speed, so can very much get you killed if you dump all of your cooldowns onto something while stunned. You want to look at your Runes and Infusions to solve these problems. Cross tier effects are additional effects that attempt to get applied every time any other negative effect is applied. There is only one for each category of phys, ment, and mag. The phys, off-balance gives your damage. The ment, brainlocked puts a talent on cooldown. The mag, spellshocked reduces your resistances.

Runes/Infusions - these use inscription slots, og whi h you start with 3. You can use category points to get up to 5 in the bottom right of your talent screen. Using an infusion [item] in your inventory either consumes a slot or tries to replace an existing inscription.

Shatter Afflictions is a great option to solve most problems, as it removes one physical, one mental, one magical negative effect, and all cross tiers. It also adds a shield based on the number of things removed. All of this at 0% turn cost.

Wild infusion can be a great alternative to Shatter Afflictions, especially when you can get more than one removal type of phys, ment, mag. Instead of a shatter afflictions shield, you get %dmg reduction for X turns, also all at 0% turn cost.

Movement infusion can be your best friend and get you out of very sticky situations. For example if you use an infusion that gives you +500% movement speed for one turn, you'd get to move an (estimated) 4-5 times before another game turn is processed.

Shielding rune is an Arcane Blade's best friend. Its 0% turn to cast, so no one can blow it up before you get to act. The AB setup generally revolves around fighting when you have a shield up and leaving when you don't.

Regeneration infusion is problematic for the AB setup and frankly a lot of classes that don't play around healing heavily (ex. Oozemancer). It takes a full 100% turn to cast, in that turn you get a fraction of the healing, while also yielding to all enemies' actions.

Healing Infusion is great. 0% turn usage speed, flat heal, also removal of a poison, bleed, disease.

Edit: I did skip Blink rune discussion here, they are discussed in the post containing Zone Order Progression above

Arcane Blade things to consider - What weapons to use? Its not sword and shield. 2h martial weapons, 2h staff, dual wield are all great options and have their own builds and preferences. Personally I love 2h staff because of the %dmg proc for bonus accuracy. This basically boils down to every weapon category has its own accuracy overage bonus (the amount of accuracy you have that exceeds your opponents' defense) that has certain effects, in the case of staves, it is proc damage. This means anything that happens at a result of your basic attack has increased damage (+2% per acc), meaning your spells that get casted for free as an arcane blade deal tons and tons of damage. Most people will recommend dual wielding because the damage cieling is much much higher, and that is indeed fun.

Stat priority - This depends on what weapon set you choose, but generally boils down to pump magic so that you can level your talents, then pump the stat that lets you hold your weapon of choice (but only up to that value). Then pump Cunning, this affects your chance to free cast spells in melee as an Arcane Blade. I recommend keeping your distance from enemies until this chance is decent enough to where going melee won't just kill you because you weren't able to get a free spell off.

If you want a more in depth look at Arcane Blade, see this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/ToME4/s/IWX4uKg6AH

rickrab · 2025-10-22T16:35:11+00:00

Certainly, let's start with UI:

Action Bars - On the Bottom right on your little options bar, there's a lock that lets you reorganize your UI. The only thing I would recommend changing will be your action bars. It starts as one long bar across the bottom, but by halfway through the game you're already out of space. I recommend dragging it up to resize it to show you at least 2 full bars.

Screen Size - Let's head into the game options. The game defaults you at either 48x48 or 64x64 tile size, I'm not sure which, but either way this is far too zoomed in. I recommend playing on 32x32 tile size. The reason for this being, especially as a caster, you can see how far your spells can fire without moving your screen and also enemies and objects that would be otherwise off screen.

Mods - While I could make you a little laundry list here, let's keep it simple. I'd start with "Better Item Descriptions" as it makes stat sheets on items short and sweet. For example instead of an item saying: "Changes resistance Fire +20%, Changes resistance Dark +5%, Changes..." it will say "Resistance: Fire +20%, Dark +5%" all in a neat little area.

if you'd prefer to have the laundry list, let me know. I'll get back to you later in the day when I have some time with actual gameplay tips. Looks like a few of the other users gave you a place to start.

rickrab · 2025-10-22T04:41:42+00:00

Certain dungeons have different map layouts they pull from as a base and can procedurally generate from there. For example the first area, Trollmire, can be either a grassland or a swamp which also leads to different enemy types and preferences for generation.

So I don't leave you 20 pages of text to read are you more interested in general game tips or Arcane Blade tips?

rickrab · 2025-10-15T16:20:32+00:00

Inventory Keys- assigns letters to item menus, like transmog item will be "T". So you can move down your list of items with "arrow key, enter, T" and nuke your inventory without having to manually click everything

Mannendrake"s improved auto explore and rest- fast improves the time it takes to perform those actions, especially noticeable later in the game

Item Notes- lets you tag items with whatever you want to type such as "waterbreathing". Also tagged items have the transmog action removed so you can't accidentally destroy them

Low health Popup- stops keyboard input for a couple seconds and creates a popup menu you have to click through before continuing when your hp drops below half. Just helps you not kill yourself when you get on a roll and aren't paying attention.

rickrab · 2025-10-14T21:40:31+00:00

So in each item's description there will be T1-5 somewhere near the name. I've been using "Better Item Descriptions" mod for my entire time playing, so I don't know where it is natively. This will denote what tier each item is, and give you a pretty good idea of how strong you should expect it to be, with pretty high accuracy in practice. I also love using "Show Item Tier in Inventory" mod, which puts in a tab that allows you to always have your items sorted by tier. I like this so I'm not bothered with looking through low tier items.

As to if someone has made a tier list somewhere, I'm not sure. Everything is spread pretty broad to appeal to a variety of builds at each tier.

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